Recently vibrational optical activity has been observed for the first time by the discovery of vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) and Raman circular intensity differential (CID) scattering. The objective of this proposed research is to demonstrate the potential of vibrational optical activity as a new spectroscopic probe of the structure, conformation and configuration of peptides, polypeptides and proteins. This demonstration will involve further development of the techniques of vibrational optical activity both experimentally and theoretically and the establishment of a basis for understanding the vibrational optical activity of proteins. An initial VCD study of alanine in the carbon hydrogen stretching region has been completed and preliminary VCD spectra of oligopeptides containing alanine, and polyalanine, show variations which indicate the influence of peptide subunit coupling. We propose to extend these studies to the mid-infrared region below two thousand wavenumbers and to initiate experiments with Raman optical activity. In each program of study we plan to start with relatively simple molecules such as amino acids and dipeptides and progress in complexity to oligopeptides, polypeptides and proteins. In addition, theoretical and computational studies will be carried out to provide correlation and support for spectral observations.